Why is anti-abortion violence spiking–with George Tiller’s death at the hands of alleged shooter Scott Roeder just the latest and most high-profile episode?

Jon A. Shields, an assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of an intriguing new book, “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right,” finds an explanation in the history of the abortion rights movement in which Roe v. Wade was the spur to radicalization–and things went downhill from there. Shields explains in an essay in The New Republic:

In 1973, Roe v. Wade dramatically changed abortion politics and the right-to-life movement in particular by pushing much of it out of the state houses and into the streets. Activists began staging “sit ins” as early as 1975 in Washington D.C. The pioneers of the “rescue” movement, as it came to be called by its evangelical heirs, reasoned–correctly, as it turned out–that they had little chance of passing a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution or changing the makeup of the court. “It was frustration and despair that split the anti-abortion movement in two,” Risen and Thomas explain. “Those who refused to accept the mainstream, incremental lobbying efforts moved into a ‘direct-action’ movement.”

That’s been said before, and is not so controversial. But he continues:

By the late 1980s, the movement had grown bigger and more aggressive from an influx of evangelical fundamentalists. Unlike the small sit-ins orchestrated by leftist Catholics, Operation Rescue orchestrated large clinic blockages in cities from New York to Los Angeles. The promise of this campaign–and the influence of Operation Rescue–actually controlled violence-prone extremists. Throughout the 1980s, for instance, there was an inverse correlation between abortion-related violence and the success of civil disobedience. As Christopher Keleher found in the DePaul Law Review, “the drop in the number of violent incidents correlated with increase in the number of nonviolent protests.” The nonviolent, civil disobedience seemed to control violence-prone radicals by providing them with an outlet for their pro-life zeal.

But this institutional restraint largely disappeared when Operation Rescue imploded in 1992, partly because of the autocratic management style of its leader, Randall Terry. And perhaps more importantly, many activists simply exhausted their energy and vacation time in jail. These internal failures were greatly compounded by the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act under the Clinton administration, which made it a federal crime to participate in clinic blockades. The collapse of Operation Rescue released violent radicals from any institutional constraints, leaving them to their own darkest desires. As Risen and Thomas explain, “Within two years of [the collapse of rescue], what was left of the movement was dominated by extremists who refused to place any limits on direct action to stop abortion.” Fueling radicalism even further, the Supreme Court upheld Roe just months after the collapse of Operation Rescue.

Violence soon followed…

He concludes:

“It is, of course, impossible to rerun history without the intervention of the Supreme Court and a federal crackdown on civil disobedience. We don’t really know if the passions this issue excites could have been channeled in a more constructive and peaceful direction, and it is likely that violence would have increased without the government’s involvement. Nonetheless, it is ironic that turbulent 1960s was the decade in which the coolest heads prevailed in abortion politics–and that the lack of radical institutions today may be what has bred the latest round of violence.”

Shields’ analysis strikes me as well-informed and challenging to all sides.

David Gibson

DAVID GIBSON is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism. He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s.

Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name "Karol Wojtyla," and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation.

Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism.

Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a "powerful" and "first-rate" treatment of the crisis from "an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber."

His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as "an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book" from "a master storyeller."

Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.